Everyone..

I came across this article today:

The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience - Baekdal.com

It puts forth the proposition that usability (ease of use) and a positive user experience are at odds. What do you think?

What i like most is I used to travel that high experience road in the pic everyday. I think what the article overlooks is the two functions overlap. You can have both, but it is a constant chore do keep upgrading.

I agree, I think the real key is getting both. It's not a good user experience if it is overly complicated, no matter how "cool" it may be.

That's why good web designers actually make the big bucks!

Pete

__________________
Reverend Pete
Code Of Paint
Learn to program using Flash

Amen to that Reverend. I have a friend who pitches a $20,000 product with a $20 site. He just don't get it.

I can see what they mean, but don't agree with that. I fyou are careful with the kind of site you put together, then you get both. Thing is, in this day and age, everyone seems to want flash bang fancy dancy whiplash sites with code that would boggle the imagination (and hang your browser up too). What ever happened to the rule of thumb that create a web site that browsers at least 3 (and sometimes 5) years older than currently on the market can READ. Which means you code to the larger common denominator and not the high end users with all the bells and whistles... :-)

Deija

That seems to have gone out the window with the current web 2.0 conversion. The problem is the browser changes are so drastic anyone with IE below 6 cannot handle the new css xhtml.

Agreed. That's one of the reasons that I prefer to work with Flash. You can tightly control the site to make sure that the user has a new enough Flash Player, and in general, the cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility is extremely good.

I do find bugs in the Flash Player from time to time, but Adobe/Macromedia seems to be reasonably good at addressing the critical issues.

Pete

__________________
Reverend Pete
Code Of Paint
Learn to program using Flash

I think you have to always keep the average Joe in mind and keep things simple, regardless.

the problem as I found in my all flash site is that search engines don't recognize flash. That's why foxsports.com trashed theirs.

Yeah, the search engine problem with Flash is definitely an issue. They tried to fix that by allowing you to export the keywords from the text in the Flash, but that doesn't work worth a damn - and the web crawlers just think you're keyword spamming, and start ignoring you.

I often do sites in HTML, and just embed Flash elements around the page to make it dynamic. Then you just have to be sure that any content that actually resides in Flash has enough stuff around it that the web crawlers will see.

I'd love to see them come up with a better solution. Sigh. (And by "them", I mean either Adobe, or the search engines themselves...)

Pete

__________________
Reverend Pete
Code Of Paint
Learn to program using Flash

I did get my all flash site up to a 3 in one month. It was a lot of work.